Chapter 11.                                           (continued) 

When slaves eventually became nearly half of the population of southern Italy, the Romans viewed this situation as just part of the natural order. This view, by the way, that superior people must have slaves in order to have time to pursue nobler ideals and activities did not originate with the Romans. It had been Aristotle’s view centuries before, and he defended it at length for reasons similar to those that were part of the total cultural outlook of the Romans. These people were convinced, without thinking about it, that their country’s system and the patriotism that it fostered—patriotism that had been displayed over and over by them, their fellow citizens, and their ancestors—made them superior. The Romans believed they deserved to be the masters of inferior cultures.

A society built on slaves and materialism and restrained only by a warrior’s code of discipline and loyalty, had to collapse when the warriors ran out of territories to conquer and sank into boredom, sloth, envy, and internal strife. In short, the cultural code account was depleted until it was bankrupt and overdrawn. By the time its people realized that Rome really could fall, it was too late.

   

                                     Late Roman decadence, as conceived by artist Thomas Couture 

Note how the decline of the Romans’ value system and the laziness of the later Romans regarding ideals of citizenship and honesty presaged that fall. Note also how we today understand intuitively the crucial roles values play in the shaping of citizens’ lifestyles and, therefore, in the success of their state. We know of this relationship at a level so deep that we take it to be obvious. When the Romans became hypocritical and corrupt, the collapse of their state became inevitable (we assume). (Note that this idea is common among modern scholars, but it comes from Edward Gibbon, whose work on the subject is still, arguably, the most respected of all time.³)

But values and their material consequences are not obvious; the relationship between a society’s moral values and its survival has eluded analysis for too long. In this twenty-first century, we must do better.

 

   

                                

                    Conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity (artist, Peter Paul Rubens) 

What followed, in the West, was the rise of the Christianity. Did Christianity get strong because it offered Romans a way out of the cynical ennui of life in the late Roman Empire, i.e. programmed them to be values-driven again? Or did it just happen to coincide with that ennui? My position is that values coincide with social change because values changes lead to new patterns of behavior, ones that either help or hinder a society in its struggle to survive. Neither causes the other. They are both symptoms of deeper changes in a nation’s consciousness, but they are useful indicators and it just may be that in this century, the twenty-first by Western reckoning, we will be able to get a handle on those deeper processes, plan and implement our future growth, and end the horrors of our species’ past. That is what the triumph of reason will mean, if we can bring it about.

Christianity told people that the highest state for a human to aspire to is not citizenship. It us a state of grace, that is, peace with God. This was easier to achieve in a monastery or nunnery. Renounce the world in all of its tempting forms; focus on eternity. The balance between Christian values and Roman ones was hard to strike. When the Visigoths’ challenge came, to many Roman citizens had let their virtues and the behaviors attached to them slide for too long. The Christian community, in the meantime, had been taught to shut it all out. People who had integrated the two value sets, who could be passionately loyal to Rome and also to the more rigorous moral code of Christianity, were too few to stop the barbarian tide. Rome fell, in an agony that we today cannot imagine. But the challenge was bound to come. One hundred fifty years in evolutionary terms is six generations – almost nothing. For Europe to find the balance between the ideals of democratic citizenship and those of Christian spirituality took another thousand years. More on that as we proceed.